Garrison Keillor – The hustling Evangelical with ethics issues and a chip on her shoulder could be our first woman president.

So the Republicans havedecided to run against themselves. The bums have tiptoed out the back door and circled around to the front and started yelling, “Throw the bums out!” They’vebeen running Washington like a well-oiled machine to the point of invitinglobbyists into the back rooms to write the legislation, and now they are anti-establishment reformers dedicated to delivering us from themselves. AndMayor Giuliani is an advocate for small-town America.Bravo.

They are coming out forSmall Efficient Government the very week that the feds are taking over Fannieand Freddie, those old cash cows, and in the course of a weekend 20 or 50 (orpick a number) billion go floating out the Treasury door. Hello? Do you see usout here? We are not fruit flies, we are voters, we can read and write, wedidn’t just fall off the coal truck.

It is a bold move on theRepublicans’ part — forget about the past, it’s only history, so write a new narrative and be who you want to be — and if they succeed, I think I mightdeclare myself a 24-year-old virgin named Lance and see what that might lead to.Paste a new face on my Facebook page, maybe become the Dauphin Louie the Thirty-Second, the rightful heir to the Throne of France, put on silk tights andpantaloons and a plumed hat and go on the sawdust circuit and sell souvenir hankies imprinted with the royal fleur-de-lis. They will cure neuralgia and gout and restore marital vigor.

Mr. McCain has decided torun as a former POW and a maverick, a maverick’s maverick, rather than Mr.Bush’s best friend, and that’s understandable, but how can he not address the $3trillion that got burned up in Iraq so far? It’s real money, it could’ve paidfor a lot of windmills, a high-speed rail line in Ohio, some serious R&D.The Chinese, who have avoided foreign wars for 50 years, are taking enormousleaps forward, investing in their economy, and we are falling behind. We’rewasting our chances. The Republican culture of corruption in Washington hasn’t helped.

And a former mayor of a townof 7,000 who hired a lobbyist to get $26 million in federal earmarks is nowrunning against the old-boy network in Washington who gave her that money tobuild the teen rec center and other good things so she could keep taxes low inasilla. Stunning. And if you question her qualifications to be the leader ofthe free world, you are an elitist. This is a beautiful maneuver. I wish I hadthought of it back in school when I was forced to subject myself to a final examin higher algebra. I could have told Miss Mortenson, “I am a Christian and when you gave me a D, you only showed your contempt for the Lord and for the godlyhardworking people from whom I have sprung, you elitist battle ax you.”

In school, you couldn’t getaway with that garbage because the taxpayers know that if we don’t upholdscholastic standards, we will wind up driving on badly designed bridges and go in for a tonsillectomy and come out missing our left lung, so we flunk thelosers lest they gain power and hurt us, but in politics we bring forth phonies and love them to death.

I must say, it was funhaving the Republicans in St. Paul and to see it all up close and firsthand.Security was, as one might expect, thin-lipped and gimlet-eyed, but once you gotthrough it, you found the folks you went to high school with — farm kids, jocks, the townies who ran the student council, the cheerleaders, some of the bullies — and they are as cohesive now as they were back then, dedicated toschool spirit, intolerant of outsiders, able to jump up and down and holler forsomething they don’t actually believe. But oh Lord, what they brought forth this year. When you check the actuarial tables on a 72-year-old guy who’s had threebouts with cancer, you guess you may be looking at the first woman president, ahustling Evangelical with ethics issues and a chip on her shoulder who, notcounting Canada, has set foot outside the country once — a trip to Germany,Iraq and Kuwait in 2007 to visit Alaskans in the armed service. And who listed arefueling stop in Ireland as a fourth country visited. She’s like the CurrentOccupant but with big hair. If you want inexperience, there were better choices.